Balloon: Altitude (The Balloon Series Book 1) by Keith Christopher

Author:Keith, Christopher [Keith, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pagetrim Book Services
Published: 2021-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 32

Ariane had known it would be bad, but nothing could have prepared her for just how bad. Worse, much worse than she had imagined. The explosions had sparked massive fires, and the smoke had completely blocked out the sun, casting the country in darkness.

A line of fire burnt along the horizon in the east with sparks and embers streaming on the wind, setting off new fires.

Deadly material would have fallen from the sky, coating the land, leaving survivors little time to flee.

A small church, unremarkable by design, was burning fiercely, and she watched as the upper half imploded. The structure leaned to the side with the protection of neither the roof nor walls, succumbing to the fire as easily as a house of matchsticks .

Ariane craned her neck to the west, where the fires burnt less intensely. Between the two contrasting horizons sat a small town.

The temperature had risen inside her spacesuit. While the liquid-cooling tubes in her spandex garment staved off excess body heat, the air-cooling ventilators appeared to have ceased working.

She drank some water and set off for the town. A gust of wind blew against her parachute and dragged her back several steps.

She calmly found the quick-release buckles and shrugged the pack off her shoulders. The canopy blew several feet into the air before deflating into a flat sheet.

The heater lost power again, misting up her visor. In less than a minute, it popped back on, and the fog-over slowly receded.

She hurried towards the town, crossing the blackened wasteland before it happened again and she lost her sight. It was unnerving, this new unreliability in her vision.

Every few seconds, she glanced up, searching for Peta, Lloyd and Donavon, due any moment now. ‘Will, do you copy?’

She scanned the broken roofs and jagged structures in the town. Everything except reinforced concrete buildings was demolished with efficiency as true as an atomic clock.

She kept moving, searching for signs of life, for the crew, for anyone who had taken refuge underground to escape the explosions. It wouldn’t be long before they crept back to the surface, naïve to the deadly radiation around them.

‘Ariane here. I’m in some town. I don’t know where. Everything is on fire.’

She paused, waiting for the heater to regain power as the town vanished, masked again behind the mist.

When the heater refused to cooperate, she drew in a mouthful of water from her in-suit drink pouch, pursed her lips and sprayed the centre of her visor, creating a hole in the steam.

With restricted vision, she proceeded cautiously, every step ultra-slow. The ground began to alter. She felt the soft turf give way to asphalt. ‘Will? Peta? Do you copy?’

The mist dissolved under the reactivated heater, so she hurriedly crossed the road full of smashed-up and burning vehicles. The EMP would have affected all modern cars equipped with and reliant on computer technology before the heatwave, knocking out power, sending them coasting out of control into one another.

In the town, the deserted streets were punctuated with heaps of charred rubble.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.